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If the US had heeded the lessons of history, it might never have gone there in the first place. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839 as a gambit in what Kipling called "the Great Game", the 100-year contest with Russia for power and influence in Asia Minor.

Three years later the occupying force straggled out of Kabul on a promise of safe passage only to be systematically massacred. The events leading up to the retreat from Kabul and the retreat itself remain among the worst humiliations in British military history.

The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1980s in order to prop up a puppet communist regime. Having bombed the place most of the way back to the Stone Age - by 1990 Afghanistan was ranked among the five least developed nations on earth - the USSR pulled out leaving their Afghan comrades to fend for themselves. They couldn't.